I NEEDED SOME LIGHT
“…I offered myself up to the pale field
of possibly, gravity—the answer
to your luminous grin, you, the god, the gamble.
I forgot my stupid life…”
Everything is an Opening: Ecstatic Invitations in heidi andrea restrepo rhodes’s “Ampersand Organ”
heidi andrea restrepo rhodes “unfixes the reader,” blurring the boundaries between bodies and language, cell and song, in their kaleidoscopic new collection.
BLACK DOLLS
Folio in Conversation with the Collection of Deborah Neff
Edited by Jennifer Maritza McCauley
Introduction by Courtenay M. Kantanka
featuring new work by Courtenay M. Kantanka, Jessica L. Barbee, Anne Marie Ward, Alex Tretbar, Daniela Barzallo, Miranda Reinberg, Haley Herzberg, Bayleigh Williams, Amanda Trout, and Mary Sauer
Fall 2025–Spring 2026
Pleiades 45.2 + 46.1 is the double issue for Fall 2025 and Spring 2026. This double issue features two special folios: "Missouri Writers" and "Black Dolls: In Conversation with The Collection Of Deborah Neff." Missouri Writers" was edited by Jennifer Maritza McCauley,...
Our latest issue
Fall 2025–Spring 2026
Pleiades 45.2 + 46.1 is the double issue for Fall 2025 and Spring 2026. This double issue features two special folios: “Missouri Writers” and “Black Dolls: In Conversation with The Collection Of Deborah Neff.”
News
Poetry
Fiction
Essays
Reviews
Interviews
“Rakija (Again)” and “It All Falls Apart at a Buc-ee’s in Alabama”
“…or maybe more like archangels lighting
up Sodom, all of us watching our world
with sodium-encrusted gazes, this garden
we’ve muscled into giving us everything
and giving it now…”
Deep Space: On Kim Choyeop’s “If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light”
If our breakneck technological innovations aren’t working to bring us closer together, Choyeop asks in this poignant collection, then what, really, is the point of them all?
“The art of love” and “An idea of afterlife”
“…And those girls.
They already wear bras
and smell of sour cherries,
and you can tell they smoke
more than just cigs….”
Time and Tide in Rebecca Hart Olander’s “Singing from the Deep End”
In “Singing from the Deep End,” Olander offers readers an ode to grief and girlhood, to the mothers and memories that never truly leave us.
Three Poems
Infomercial for Soft Things (Alcibiades) Alcibiades—Athenian playboy, politician, and general who switched his allegiances between Athens and Sparta during the Peloponnesian War—embraced wantonness and excessive luxury. He had the planks of his ship taken out to...
Real Fictions: Sites of Sustained Thinking in Nicole Graev Lipson’s “Mothers and Other Fictional Characters”
Lipson offers a model of maternal writing that insists on intellectual seriousness, demonstrating that motherhood is not a retreat from thinking, but one of its most demanding forms.
Dancing Between the Raindrops: A Conversation with Lisa Braxton
“I always tell people that my writing routine is like making a hamburger: it comes out at the end, and it tastes good, but you don’t want to see the process.”
Congratulations to Andrew Garvin, Winner of the Prufer Poetry Prize!
Contest judge Sarah Ghazal Ali writes: ‘County Fairs’ is palindromic and prognostic, wielding time like a lens into the contours of pain.
Choking Toward Life: On Didi Jackson’s “My Infinity”
In her pursuit for both answers and absolution, Jackson chokes toward life, toward new love, toward something adjacent to whatever we call God.